Joe - There are a LOT of self-hosted auto-responders out there. The advantage to these (especially when sending internally) is that you're using an internal mailbox to send, so you won't get flagged as Spam.
Also, the comment below makes sense. Our main customers have email distribution lists that range from small teams to the entire enterprise and they all have a full SMTP address. We just use that for the notification. B. From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Grooms, Frederick W Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 9:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Email distribution services ** Since you probably have an email server in house already, are these lists of users already defined in groups in there? If so then you just need to reference the email addresses of these groups. Fred From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joe Castleman Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 9:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Email distribution services ** Thanks for the responses. There are various reasons why mgmt doesn't want to handle this in-house, although I am fairly certain that's what we'll end up doing (along the lines of what Ken suggested). I need to present the options, though, so thanks David for the Mailgun recommendation, and to Steve for the caveats. Joe -----Original Message----- On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Steve Kallestad wrote: ** I've been down that rabbit hole and the potential problems are an enormous headache. The problem with using a commercial service to handle your mailing list is that you're very dependent on not only their infrastructure, but their reputation as well. All it takes is one of their *other* customers to end up on a spammer list for your messages to have problems with delivery. Not to mention your own messaging setup could trigger auto-flagging of that company as a spammer. If you can avoid it, you're better off handling things internally with whatever infrastructure you have in place. Otherwise you run the danger of learning way more about email delivery than anybody should ever really know. If you have to go external, choose a service that will leverage your own companies hostnames for delivery. (autonotifications.yourcompany.com<http://autonotifications.yourcompany.com> rather than mail.biglistprovider.com<http://mail.biglistprovider.com>) so that when you do end up having users with flagged messages you can whitelist without having to whitelist a plethora of other companies at the same time. And if you do that, you want to make sure you use SPF/DomainKeys/DKIM/SenderID again to ensure that your whitelisting is valid. It really is a simple thing that you want. Unfortunately, spammers have really mucked things up for the rest of us. Sorry - I don't have a recommended provider. I just had to throw my 2 cents in. Steve -----Original Message----- On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Joe Castleman wrote: ** Howdy, I flagged this as off-topic since it really isn't a Remedy question per se, though it does involve a Remedy system. We need to send different kinds of notifications from ARS to various distribution lists. We would rather not build up these lists within ARS (mainly because many of the recipients don't have Remedy access; also so I won't have to be the one maintaining the distribution groups; and finally so ARS would only have to send one message to 1-5 recipients instead of 487). So we were thinking about setting up a separate server running Mailman, Listserv or similar, and maintain the distribution lists on that platform. However, management said, "why worry ourselves with more infrastructure?" and suggested looking into a commercial distribution service. For example, when Pottery Barn/Gap/whatever sends out a weekly marketing email, at the end of the email it says "Powered by MegaSpammer" or some such. Trouble is, these seem tailored to sending out feature-laden emails (as opposed to the plain text we need to send out), and to one particular distribution list. So, I'm back to looking for something like Mailman or Listserv, but paying someone else to take care of it (all we'd have to do is configure our mailing lists and send our messages). Can anyone recommend something like this? (Alternately we're thinking of getting a virtual server on the cloud somewhere like AWS, then installing Mailman on it, but then we'd still be on the hook for maintaining Mailman, and management prefers that we wouldn't even have to do that.) I wouldn't be surprised if I've overlooked something really obvious, but so far all I'm finding are the "Powered by SpamRockets" with the fancy HTML templates etc. Thanks, I'm Joe Castleman ________________________________ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<http://www.avg.com> Version: 2013.0.2904 / Virus Database: 2641/6168 - Release Date: 03/12/13 _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
